Emma Lee

      A Cherry Tree in Scraptoft The instruction invites overthinking: describe your hometown through the medium of simple sentences and limited [foreign/new] vocabulary. My home is beautiful (isn’t this obligatory?) There is a small park (gifted...

Vanessa Napolitano

      Pork Chop I ask my father to dinner, pretending he is still alive, ask him what he’d like. He says a pork chop which is not something I know how to cook. Anyway it’s January, I’m vegetarian today, and it’s raining. You can have curry, I tell him....

David Forrest

      Science Communication I don’t know why you bother with poetry Vlad mutters as he adjusts the current in the magnets, forcing them to rhyme with each other. We sit in a control room connected to dozens of monitors, sensors and trackers trained to...

Ashley Dunn

      Gone Fishing I bounced past the other boy in the bedsit balancing on the balcony. I’d just woken up. He’d been pulling fishing line out of his mouth for sixty-three days now and the floats had just stopped. ‘Not sure how much more I’ve got!’ and...

Neil Fulwood

      A Croc in the Field for Harry Paterson Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift has hacked the WiFi password in the ear canal and now I’m looping back endlessly to a misheard lyric: “you picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille, with four hundred...